Ambassador White & Belgian Antisemitism

When Ambassador Bill White criticized Belgium over the growing attacks against Jewish religious life, many attempted to dismiss his words as excessive or provocative. In reality, his criticism touched a far deeper nerve: the uncomfortable truth that the current prosecution of mohels over Brit Milah is not an isolated legal case, but part of a long historical continuum.

The atmosphere did not emerge overnight.

Only recently, at the beginning of Pesach — one of the holiest moments in the Jewish calendar — Antwerp chose to award an honorary doctorate to a controversial former United Nations official widely accused by Jewish organizations and critics of repeatedly promoting rhetoric perceived as openly hostile toward Israel and insensitive toward Jewish concerns. To many in the Jewish community, the symbolism was striking. At a moment when Jews were celebrating liberation and continuity, Belgium’s academic establishment appeared to honor a figure associated, in their eyes, with persistent hostility toward the Jewish state and Jewish sensitivities.

For many Jews, this did not feel accidental. It felt like yet another signal that antisemitism and anti-Jewish hostility are increasingly normalized in respectable circles.

Then came the attacks on kosher slaughter. Belgium proudly presented the ban as a progressive measure, while ignoring the fact that for observant Jews, shechita is not optional. Jewish leaders warned at the time that once a state begins outlawing core religious practices, other pillars of Jewish life would inevitably come under attack.

They were right.

Next came public discussions about restricting or even outright banning Brit Milah, one of the oldest and holiest rituals in Judaism, dating back to Abraham himself. Now Belgium has reached the stage where prosecutors are targeting mohels — the very individuals entrusted with maintaining the covenant that has preserved Jewish identity for thousands of years.

To many Jews, this no longer feels like a debate about child welfare or ethics. It feels like a systematic attempt to make traditional Jewish life impossible.

Ambassador White understood something that much of the Belgian establishment still refuses to admit: this case is merely the final drop in a bucket already overflowing with historical unresolved antisemitism.

Belgium never fully came clean with its wartime past.

During the Holocaust, Belgian railways transported Jews to deportation camps under Nazi occupation. For every Jew transported, the railways reportedly received payment from the German authorities — approximately four Reichspfennig per kilometer per deported Jew. In today’s value, the total would amount to tens of millions of euros. Yet the debate over full accountability and compensation has remained painfully incomplete.

At the same time, Belgian museums still contain more than a thousand artworks looted from Jewish victims during the war. Decades after the Holocaust, many families continue waiting for proper restitution, transparency, or justice. Europe speaks endlessly about memory, remembrance, and “never again,” yet concrete unresolved questions remain hanging on museum walls.

The deeper historical pattern is impossible to ignore.

In the Middle Ages, Jews across the Low Countries were restricted, segregated, expelled, or persecuted under legal and religious pretexts. In modern times came collaboration during the Nazi occupation and the deportation of more than 25,000 Jews from Belgium to death camps.

Even today, Jewish schools in Antwerp and Brussels require military protection. Synagogues are guarded behind concrete barriers. Orthodox Jews regularly report harassment simply for wearing visible Jewish clothing in public.

Then came the 2014 terror attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, where four innocent people were murdered by an Islamist extremist. Belgium promised vigilance. Belgium promised solidarity.

Yet instead of strengthening Jewish confidence, Belgian society repeatedly reopens debates over whether Jews should still be allowed to practice Judaism in its traditional form at all.

That is why the prosecution of mohels carries such symbolic weight.

Defenders of these measures insist that “this is not antisemitism.” But history teaches Jews that hostility rarely begins with openly declared hatred. It begins with restrictions. With legal technicalities. With moral justifications. With the slow normalization of the idea that Jewish practices are somehow incompatible with modern society.

A country that bans kosher slaughter, debates outlawing circumcision, prosecutes mohels, leaves unresolved questions about wartime responsibility, still struggles with restitution of Jewish property, and repeatedly sends hostile symbolic signals to its Jewish community cannot simply wave away accusations of structural antisemitism.

Ambassador White’s remarks therefore deserve serious reflection, not outrage.

Because for many Belgian Jews, this case is not the beginning of a problem.

It is the moment the accumulated weight of history finally became impossible to ignore.